Let My People Think

Posts tagged ‘freedom’

In the modern world, we are truly experiencing a crisis of integrity. I have no idea when it became normal for leaders to stop standing by their words, drastically changing the stories several times in a row in a course of days. Reading recent news stories about the United Airlines CEO squirm around like an eel on a frying pan trying to explain why it’s OK to knock out the teeth and break the nose of a paying airline customer gives a new meaning to a phrase “top communicator”. The only thing that’s uplifting about that particular story is the universal outrage that followed. On a practical level, that outpouring of wrath at a big corporation gone fat and proud gave me more faith in humankind than perhaps anything else in recent news.

After 2016, many Christians stopped looking to national Evangelical figures for examples of value-driven integrity-based leadership. That distrust has been in the making for some time. In the fall of 2016, I remember a time when a leading Evangelical ethicist changed his lofty ethical prescription 3 times in the course of 10 days. Not just modified it a little bit, but dramatically flip-flopped on his stance – went one way, then in a few days completely reversed himself, then in a few more days reversed the reversal. It was truly a painfully pathetic sight to behold. It seemed to have served as a capstone to a trend that has been two to three decades in the making.

It was clear that “being faithful to the end” somehow turned into “being faithful to one’s tribal self-interest to the end”. And for the publicly vocal and politically engaged group of Christians that the above-mentioned ethicist claimed to have represented, any claim to moral or ethical higher ground, along with any right to criticize ethical and moral relativism, went straight out the window. Yep, just like that. You can’t just flip-flop 2 times on “timeless moral and ethical values” in the course of 10 days and still expect to be recognized as a beacon of pure light in the corrupt world.(more…)

Here’s an interesting passage in the New Testament that concerns submission to governing authorities:

Romans 13:1 New International Version (NIV)
13 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

On the surface, a translation like that seems to imply that any expression of Western-style democracy is a direct rebellion against God. That reading would also mean that Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot are legitimately examples of Godly leaders. That’s why this reading a very attractive target for abuse by manipulative preachers and “prophets” who don’t shy away from using out-of-context Scriptural prooftexts to prop up their own agendas.

But there’s a little translation peculiarity that’s often overlooked, and yet it considerably changes the meaning of the entire chapter. Here is Romans 13:1 in hyper-literal translation from ancient Koine Greek:(more…)